


Album

by radeeoactive



Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Fallout, Fallout 4 - Freeform, IT'S BULLSHIT, Melodrama, Sole Survivor, but man it feels good to write
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-25
Updated: 2019-06-24
Packaged: 2020-05-19 06:16:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19351183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/radeeoactive/pseuds/radeeoactive
Summary: Polaroids of Danielle Garza





	Album

A few years before Shaun was born, before the Great War started, Ryan returned from Anchorage. Despite the television displaying countless families joyously rushing and embracing each other, many reunions were muted, and theirs deathly silent. Dee still had the recording his parents took at the airfield; Ryan shuffling from the plane, reluctant. She, a poor wife, frightened that he had changed, wilted and waited rather than meeting him halfway. There was no longing kiss or bone-crushing hug. She only slipped her index finger around his and guided him to the car. The vid ended abruptly. 

The summer following, Ryan spent somewhere else. His body was in the house, but his eyes fogged and he heard gunfire in the lawnmowers. When he eventually returned to bed from the couch, he would place two fingers on her neck to be sure she was breathing. 

There was a lot her younger self didn’t understand but least of all was the hours he spent sprawled across their front lawn. He sank in their wilderness of their unmowed grass, eyes closed, sweating and sweating until she demanded he came back in to drink some water. 

At the edge of the Glowing Sea, it made a lot more sense. 

Dee found herself here more and more. First out of necessity, then out of grief. The urge to see it would march her out of Sanctuary or Goodneighbor in the dead of night. A brief panic would ensue as Piper or Preston scrambled to see where she went, though Hancock either didn’t care or always knew. Or both. Eventually they all learned she was making the trek through the harsh acidic wind and into its boiling center, and left her alone. 

It remained the only thing that could move her. 

She’d started  _peeling_  some time ago, and lately her hair was falling out in chunks. Emotions and nerves alike were deadening. Biology had been much more creative with her than her poor son. She was the last pure human specimen of old, and she was determined to destroy the notion. At forty, give or take two hundred, she had lived much longer than she had intended at both ends of the cryogenic slumber. 

But here, in the dulled bright, she was exposed. Even Kellogg was silenced in the face of it. Sweat poured down her back alongside dead skin. The feeling was boiled out to the surface. She could not hide what she was: poor wife, worse mother, astoundingly good survivor. Unjudged, identities slicked her drying skin. 

Ryan had said he felt real in the grass, under the sun. Dee felt real under the heat of the residual radiation. She dissolved into atoms, the only thing that mattered. She saw him sometimes. It was a muted reunion, deathly silent, but shameless. She’d stretch her hands to reach. Their fingers would pass through each other and entangle, as only atoms could. 


End file.
